Comment 5 for bug 745930

In my experience in 2008-2009, just because networking is up on an EC2 instance does not mean that 169.254.169.254 is going to accept connections and requests for meta-data and user-data. You need to wait for this to become available. I had code to do this in Ubuntu AMIs I built back then.

    perl -MIO::Socket::INET -e 'until(new IO::Socket::INET("169.254.169.254:80")){sleep 1}'

I used to think I was waiting for networking to come up, but it became clear that the meta-data service was not listening even some times when networking was working and I had a local IP address on the instance.